All fonts in development build (1.11.901.3) are rendered badly (compared to stable 1.10.867.48) with anti-aliasing disabled
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Using the Vivaldi 1.11.901.3 dev snapshot I have severe rendering problems, too. I have antialiasing completely turned off in my system.
While in the stable branch (1.10.867.48) the fonts are crystal clear (as expected), the fonts in the dev branch are very badly rendered (this affects the UI, as well as all websites, including the internal ones like vivaldi://about)!
Here is a side-by-side comparison of Vivaldi stable (left) and dev (right):
The system font settings (Debian Jessie) haven't been changed in a long time, but the xserver was updated. However the stable Vivaldi version doesn't suffer this problem.
So my question is, does anybody know what has changed in Vivaldi regarding font rendering (e.g. which settings are now relevant, which weren't before)?
Any help greatly appreciated
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@Gwen-Dragon: Thanks for your suggestion, the anti-aliasing setting indeed has an effect on the fonts in the dev build.
However, the fonts look blurry then, like I perceive anti-aliasing in general. Most people seem to like it, but some (probably the minority) don't -- see e.g. this marvelous blog post.
That's why I turn antialias off everywhere by intention... and the browser is very crucial because you read a lot with that program.
So, I hope there are other solutions to get the behavior of the stable branch back.
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@Gwen-Dragon: Unfortunately
vivaldi --disable-gpu
makes no visible difference; the subpixel setting should IMHO make no difference with antialiasing disabled.The fonts in the dev build look like fonts which are optimized for antialiasing are employed, albeit antialiasing is disabled. I will investigate further if some
strace
logs of Vivaldi stable compared to Vivaldi snapshot will shed some more light onto the issue. -
@m.p.y. Sorry for replying late, but I want offer a possible solution after some digging in the source code of vivaldi, fontconfig and freetype.
I believe this is an issue with vivaldi(/chromium) bundling some newer rendering enginges than what's installed on your debian (or my slackware) system. If you set the FREETYPE_PROPERTIES environment variable to truetype:interpreter-version=35 you can instruct the newer freetype version to use the old font-hint-interpreter.FREETYPE_PROPERTIES=truetype:interpreter-version=35 vivaldi
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@lars-l I'm also sorry for my late reply, but somehow I haven't received a notification or I have overlooked it.
And thank you very much for your valuable answer!
In the meantime the problem doesn't occur in the current snapshot (1.12.953.8) anymore -- even with default
FREETYPE_PROPERTIES
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